Manufacturing and testing of dandelion-inspired flyers for environmental sensing
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Manufacturing and testing of dandelion-inspired flyers for environmental sensing
Fri, 09/05/2025 - 14:00 to 14:30
Location:
Speaker:
Bappa Mitra
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Synopsis:
Investigating flow behaviour around a dandelion diaspore led to discovery of a unique flow pattern in the wake of its pappus (Cummins et al., 2018). The existence of a stable vortex ring detached from the pappus, called a Separated Vortex Ring (SVR) enables a dandelion seed to attain a lower terminal velocity, thus a longer time of flight, which results in long-distance dispersal. In this seminar, we discuss the strategy of manufacturing dandelion-inspired ultralightweight fliers that could be used for humidity sensing during their flight. The experimental setup, instrumentation and characterisation of the flow of these artificial fliers will be presented.
Biography:
Bappa is a PhD student working on manufacturing ultralightweight environment-sensing fliers inspired by the flight of dandelion diaspores. He is a part of VOILAb, University of Edinburgh (https://voilab.eng.ed.ac.uk) where he is being supervised by Prof. Ignazio Maria Viola regarding the aerodynamics associated with such fliers, and also part of Smart Systems Group at Heriot- Watt University where Prof. Marc Desmulliez is supervising him regarding the manufacturing and sensing aspect of such ultralightweight nature inspired fliers.